Gulf South Books

The maps are great as expected from Michelin, but note that this book covers the Gulf Coast only. No complete state is mapped. The Atlantic coast of Florida is not mapped. It covers from Brownsville, TX to Miami, FL but only for about a hundred miles inshore.

The maps are great as expected from Michelin, but note that this book covers the Gulf Coast only. No complete state is mapped. The Atlantic coast of Florida is not mapped. It covers from Brownsville, TX to Miami, FL but only for about a hundred miles inshore.

The illustrations are excellent. There are numerous keys, which I have not had much opportunity to use. This book is for the advanced student or very well prepared amateur. It is NOT a match the picture guide for the casual nature lover.

Very comprehensive and specific, which I needed. But contains no graphics of gardens or plants. Consider this a companion to other books that provide those features as well.

Foster's been quite thorough and provides information about the architecture, history, and things to look for when visiting these sites. I found it extremely interesting and helpful when I was doing research on the subject.

I searched far and wide for a travel guidebook that deals specifically with the Gulf Coast of Florida, and I found exactly what I was looking for in "Florida Gulf Coast: Travel Smart" by Carol J. Perry (John Muir Publications, 2000). Now that I've returned from ten interesting days of putting this book to use, I want to share my experience of applying it to my travels. While covering a geographic area from Pensacola to Naples, "Florida Gulf Coast: Travel Smart" starts off with a great introduction to the Gulf Coast including nature and history. Then it offers good background information about each destination and suggests sightseeing highlights. The sights are prioritized in order, which helps separate the "must sees" from the "if you have time" attractions. Perry suggests activities that make a "perfect day" at a given location, then gives information on food and lodging choices. Overall, this book was helpful because it told enough about a destination(I particularly enjoyed the write-ups on Apalachicola and Cedar Key) to give a general feel for it so the reader could decide if a certain place was their style or not.If so, proceed to visit and use the food and lodging selections. If not, then one can spend time elsewhere. Perry also includes Special Interest Tour sample itineraries (ex. Family Fun Tour, Nature Lovers Tour) at the back of the book. The only draw back to "Florida Gulf Coast: Travel Smart" is that pricing information is very general, at best, though ranges are presented that cover B&Bs to camping. Phone numbers are included so it is possible to call ahead for lodging. Overall, I strongly recommend this book and believe that it truly is "a different kind of guidebook". It does take the guesswork out of your travels and does an excellent job of pin pointing the most interesting attractions.

I grew up 20 miles inland from the MS Gulf Coast and all of my relatives still live on the coast or within 100 miles. This book is a painful reminder of what is lost. The hotel where my husband and I honeymooned 25 years ago, Beavior and the other historic homes that I used to admire on a scenic drive down MS Highway 90, the Broadwater Marina where my husband and I planned our future on many Sunday afternoons just watching the boats and sipping soda. This book reminds us to treasure our historic beautiful places because we never know when they may disappear.

"Walker Evans: Florida," following on the heels of last year's "Walker Evans: Signs," is the second volume in what I hope will become a series from the J.Paul Getty Museum. Revealing as well as entertaining, it presents the Getty's holdings of Florida photographs that Evans made on assignment in 1941 for "The Mangrove Coast," with text by Karl Bickel, published the following year. This is a lesser-known body of Evans's work, somewhat overshadowed by his monumental document of the Great Depression collected in the files of the Library of Congress, and in the pages of innumerable volumes since his original "American Photographs" and "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." The value of this small volume is that Evans's excellant Florida work is now back in print; and if his whole career is ever to be properly evaluated, then all of its facets must be fully examined. My only criticism is with the book's design and layout. As with "Walker Evans: Signs," the photographs are often guttered and bled off the edge of the page, and the type is laid out in such an artsy way that it is often confusing. Evans would not have approved. The enjoyable introductory essay by Robert Plunket adeptly balances information about Evans and West Florida, with personal experiences of the author, a long time Sarasota resident. This is a book that all serious students of Evans will want to have.

This is the best Laffite book on the market. Tremendous research and great references. This is a must for pirate historians and those interested in the gulf coast and New Orleans.

Davis turns the potentially exciting story of "treacherous" pirates into a story as dull as an annual report written by lawyers and accountants, because he relies too much on raw reporting of legal and accounting records.

Davis is in love with this research, and spends too much time pointing out the faults of the sources and and not enough summarizing them to a higher level. Like many non-fiction books I have read in the last couple of years, Davis seems bound to justify the purchase price by the pound. There is a truly exciting 300-page book about the treacherous world of the Pirates Lafitte in here, but unfortunately it takes Davis 490 pages to finish it.

My advice for the condensation-minded: read chapters 5 through 11 and 18 through 22, where the history is the must interesting and the narrative flows like a narrative should.

Overly-detailed telling of the life of the pirates Laffite.While I admire the authors historical prowess, I must admit reading this book was like swimming upstream....R. D. Morgan..

The Pirates Laffite: The Treacherous World of the Corsairs of the Gulf is another great book about Lafitte!! I love this book!! A must read for all pirate and Galveston history buffs! Lafitte was no pirate, he was however, a smuggler and a privateer... and he was a gentleman. Great reading!

Here's the bottom line on this book: If you're looking for a colorful folk tale of these characters, with all the atmospheric (and largely fictional) accoutrements, you're going to think that it's an "unreadable, tedious, overly detailed" bore.

If you want a well-researched narrative, one in which the author leaves no stone unturned in his search for authenticity, you'll like this book with all its warts.

This is a history book. It reads like a history book, with its emphasis on details, which brings our attention to facts that seek the more mundane truth of the matter. The life of the Laffites is so distorted by folklore that Dr. Davis has taken a hard line on archival detail and ambiguity.

He won't give you the answers to the questions he can't solve, and he won't give you the romantic picture of the setting he can't control.

This is a book for people more interested in history than pre-conceived imagery. Dr. Davis is a prolific author, and we know he has a tendency to crank out the words. That makes him subject to a few grammatical blunders from time to time, as he immerses himself in the subject matter. I will never criticize an historian for getting into his subject at the MINOR expense of a few mis-chosen conjunctions and misplaced commas.

For portraits of early American New Orleans and colonial Galveston, this book is a valuable contribution to the literature. I should mention that its annotation is extensive, as is its bibliography.

The book was a gift for my dad. He loved it! Very compelling stories and photography.

I was offended by the accusation in this book that poor black people were relegated to living in lower land in New Orleans and surrounding parishes. As usual the media wants to push their liberal, racial agenda on the south. Check the actual statistics on this hurricanes. More whites lost their lives than black and many, many wealthy areas (for blacks and whites)were devastated. Not just lower income people. We sick of having to correct people on this point.
Dianne Cochran

This book, like most written and portraying Hurricane Katrina, leads the reader to the conclusion that New Orleans is the only area devastated thereby. For anyone's information, New Orleans was on the West, or weak, side of Katrina. New Orleans was flooded because: 1) elevation there is about 7 feet BELOW sea level and 2)their levy system has NEVER been built to withstand cat 3 or greater storms. EVERY drop of rain that falls in New Orleans has to be pumped out, one way or the other. If the citizens of New Orleans had put more money into improving their levy system instead of the SuperDome, they might very well be living in dry and undamaged homes today instead of morning their dead and trying to put their city back together. New Orleans will be rebuilt someday and I hope and pray that they have learned and benefited from this disaster and won't make the same mistakes again. If you want to read and look at a balanced book coverning Hurricane Katrina, this isn't it.

The photos and accounts delivered in this Time representation of Hurricane Katrina are invaluable. Bodies floating by houses, people trapped in their attics, the anger and frustration at the Superdome, the hope and good faith of the people searching for survivors. All of this is captured by great photojournalists and poignant captions. While some reviewers feel this book focuses on only two cities' ordeals with hurricane aftermath, I think the book captures what was happening in the worst cases. Having been published about a month after the occurance, you can leave the job of chronicling the entire event to a sociologist or someone more apt to turn a profit rather than raise money for the Red Cross. This book was published so quickly that I found many typos, ("Sept. 29th" instead of "Aug. 29th" was printed way too many times, and "kids" instead of "kinds", things that spell check wouldn't catch, but an editor should have). With that in mind, I think the goal was raising money and portraying what this country let happen to it's poor and elderly. Citizens don't build levees, governments do, and this government failed.

Having lived through the Hurricane Katrina (I worked through it at one of only 3 surviving hospitals in metro New Orleans), the pictures are so profound. It comes as close to representing whatI experienced as can be represented by pictures. I highly recommend. This is one of two books that I've found that paint an accurate picture.